Former President Jimmy Carter said he very nearly came to blows with the ex-president of South Africa over AIDS treatment.
“The first time I came here to Cape Town I almost got in a fight with the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, because he was refusing to let AIDS be treated,” Mr. Carter said in The Sunday Times. That’s about the closest he came to “getting into a fistfight with a head of state,” he said, as The Blaze reported.
Mr. Carter said he was traveling with Bill Gates Sr. to South Africa to persuade the South African leader to provide a pregnant woman who was diagnosed with AIDS to take treatment, but Mr. “Mbeki was against that,” the former president said.
Mr. Mbeki long has denied any link between HIV and AIDS and even said in 1999 the medicines used to treat the virus were “toxic,” The Blaze reported.
Mr. Carter didn’t say when the near-physical altercation occurred, but the former president made a trip to the nation in 2002.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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